In our post last month regarding a Basic Troubleshooting Toolkit , one of the tools we mentioned was Process Monitor. The new version of Process Monitor combines the old Process Monitor tool with the File Monitor (FileMon) and Registry Monitor (RegMon...

Following on from our posts on the Basic Troubleshooting Toolkit and Basic Debugging of an Application Crash , let's talk about actually capturing Application crash dumps and failures. Most administrators are familiar with the Dr. Watson for Windows tool...

OK - following on from our recent WMI Architecture post, let's start digging into some Basic WMI Troubleshooting. There's a lot of material to cover, so this is going to be a multi-part series! It's important to note that these are general concepts and...

So today we're going to cover the basics of COM and DCOM. The key word here is basic - if you need to get into a depth discussion about how your custom components are working (or not working in some cases!) and your code, then you should be working with...

On Tuesday, we talked about Heap - what it is and how it works. Today we're going to continue our look at Heap. At the end of the last post we mentioned Look-Aside Lists and Low Fragmentation Heap. But before we dive into those, let's take a look at Heap...

The Performance team handles Group Policies for several different components - most notably Printing, Internet Explorer and Terminal Server. In most environments, the Active Directory administrator handles the design, implementation and maintenance all...

Today's post is actually the result of a recent series of questions on Heap and the Heap Manager that I fumbled quite hopelessly! Once I got back to my desk, I pulled out my trusty copy of Windows Internals and started reading. The more I read, the more...

Printer sharing, information retrieval, and data storage are among the most frequently used network services. This also means that when something major happens to a print server or file server - lots of people are adversely affected. Issues with Print...

Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is one of those technologies that tends to intimidate administrators who are unfamiliar with it. On the Performance team, we handle basic WMI issues - mainly relating to basic WMI functionality and permissions...